“The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers”

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3 weeks ago

From Sioux Falls to Khartoum, from Kyoto to Reykjavik; from the panchayat forests of India to the Giant’s Causeway on the coast of Northern Ireland; in taxis and at bus stops, in kitchens and sleigh beds, haystacks and airports around the globe—people are kissing one another. The sublime kiss. The ambiguous kiss. The devastating kiss. The kiss we can’t take back. The kiss we can never give. The kiss that changes a life.

Brian Turner’s new anthology The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers has just been published by W.W. Norton & Company. The collection began as a series at the online magazine Guernica. The four dozen essays, stories, poems, and graphic memoirs each focus on a specific kiss, unexpected and unforgettable. They explore the messy and complicated intimacies that exist in our actual lives, and in the complicated landscape of the imagination.

“A kiss, you see, can carry not just a heart in it, but a soul.”

— Pico Iyer, “The Kiss at Dawn”

The book was recently reviewed at The New York Times by the editor of paper’s Modern Love column. Gun & Garden included it in their February Reading List for Valentine’s Day. Editor Brian Turner is the director of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at SNC, and faculty from the MFA-CW and English departments are well-represented among the 49 contributors. Among them are Patricia Smith, Ilyse Kustnetz, Rebecca Makkai, Benjamin Busch, Lacy M. Johnson, Steven Church, Suzanne Roberts, Sholeh Wolpé, Kristen Radke, and Christian Keifer.

“Befitting the brevity of the average mouth-on-mouth contact, most entries last only two or three pages. A few go on too long, making you want to twist free, while others tantalize with such grace that they linger sweetly in your mind for days.”

Daniel Jones, the editor of The New York Times’s “Modern Love” column

All author proceeds from the book are being donated to charity. Half goes to support Guernica’s editorial internship program. The other half goes to the Ocean Clean Up Project. The non-profit designs and deploys systems to clean up much of the estimated 5 trillion pieces of plastic currently littering the world’s oceans. The technology uses ocean currents to gather the debris for “garbage collection”.